Digital-Media-Relations on Philip Sheldrake

Marketing and PR and the General Data Protection Regulation

Fri, 22 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My main character in Attenzi – a social business story , the CEO Eli Appel, has this to say over lunch with his chairman:

Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.

He adds:

… No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network.

Eli is referring here to the visceral difference between ‘doing’ social (bolted on) and ‘being’ social (built in), and you know which one you’re on the receiving end of in any given situation right?

How dare they!

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Written originally for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

You should not make edits to a Wikipedia entry when you have a conflict of interest, as any PR practitioner does in relation to their employer or client. Simple.

This Wikipedia rule is reflected precisely in the CIPR’s Wikipedia guidance , published by the social media panel last summer and supported by PR bodies in Canada, Australia and South Africa. (Although not yet in the US.)

Setting the standards for influence

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a special advisor to AMEC (the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), wearing a CIPR hat as and when. I’m part of a working group assembling recommendations on the topic of influence for deliberation at the AMEC European Summit in Madrid this June. We have input from IPR, PRSA, Womma, SNCR, IAB and other groups, associations and institutes.

I took an action to create “something to shoot at”, and I distributed the following over the weekend. On the basis that we’re an open and transparent working group, I thought I’d post it here too. Do get in touch if you’d like to tell me what you think. Now’s the time for dialogue – particularly if you can’t attend the Madrid summit – ahead of the standards setting.

A Measure Of Influence – IABC Communication World magazine

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Jessica Burnette-Lemon is Senior Editor of Communication World , the IABC ’s member magazine. I had the pleasure of talking with Jessica on the topical and some might say controversial topic of influence (in the context of marketing and PR of course).

The resultant article appears in the current issue of the magazine, but because it’s a publication for members’ eyes only, I can’t add a link here.

Who are you?

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

Identity is not a black and white thing. Sure, at one end of the spectrum anonymity reigns. This is the world of 4chan , the popular image-based bulletin board from which famous memes such as lolcats and Rickrolling emerged. At the other end of the spectrum we have passport border control.

And in between we have many shades of identity.

Nightclub handstamps for example are needed only to ascertain who has already paid. Many a website cookie serves just to determine if you’ve dropped by before. A supermarket loyalty card serves just to build up an understanding of your shopping habits, and may be associated with a bank card proffered for payment.

OK, so what has this got to do with marketing and public relations?

FIR Interview: Neville Hobson interviews Stephen Waddington and me about Share This

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Share This , the new book from the CIPR Social Media panel and friends, is selling rather well indeed. Having shot straight in at number 1 on Amazon UK’s best new business book releases, it now resides at number 13 in the Sales & Marketing category.

Wiley, the publisher, has taken more than a handful of bulk orders directly from PR agencies, which of course don’t then register on the Amazon charts else I’m sure the book would be Amazon’s number 1 of course!

Reputation and Wikipedia

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup ]

What does the Wikipedia entry for your organisation / client / brand say? What about brand references in other entries? All cosy on the Wikipedia front? And recognising that a neutral point of view (NPOV) is one of Wikipedia’s “five pillars” , you have resisted editing anything where your neutrality is questionable. Right?

Let’s face it, Wikipedia is amazing. I had the pleasure of attending the Wikipedia 10th birthday party in London last year and I wasn’t the only one there who admitted to not appreciating Wikipedia’s potential back in the day. Seriously? A website anyone can edit?! Yeah right, that’ll work. Not.

And yet today Alexa ranks Wikipedia the sixth most popular site on the web. Search for a company or brand in Google or Bing and there’s the Wikipedia entry tempting you with its neutrality, familiarity and ease of use. The Wikipedia community plays a significant role in brand reputation.

This week, one of my favourite Conversation contributors, Stuart Bruce, spotted Member of Parliament Tom Watson’s interest in Wikipedia and PR practice . He found Watson’s contribution, Wednesday, to a Wikipedia talk page:

The Influence View of Content – seeking something more useful than 'paid, owned, earned'

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[Version 0.1 « work in progress needing your critical feedback. Also available as a PDF if that suits you better.]

Précis

Categorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos.

The Influence View of Content aims to establish something more useful. It’s a perspective that seeks to help influence professionals think about how influence goes around and comes around in line with the Influence Scorecard framework .

Definition: Influence – you have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

Definition: The Influence Scorecard – serves as both the methodology for defining influence strategy and the tool for executing it.

Paid Owned Earned

With the proliferation of what used to be known as “new media”, it was natural to attempt some sort of descriptive taxonomy:

Measuring Online – CIPR Freshly Squeezed training session

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

An interesting start to the day today… over to CIPR HQ in Russell Square to deliver a training course on social measurement in the Freshly Squeezed series.

I had just 45 minutes with 15 minutes Q&A, and this time constraint combined with the state of best practice in the profession meant I was aiming simply to leave attendees knowing the right questions if not the right answers per se. After all, as the slidestack below teases out, if your organisation, marketplace, stakeholders, marketing and PR objectives, marketing and PR strategy and execution are unique, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that your metrics will be unique too.

Guilty – The CIPR Friday Roundup

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We have a fundamental tenet in our Western societies – innocent until proven guilty. The problem we have now is simply that reputation pivots faster via the social Web than can be adjudged in the courtroom.

I have no idea whatsoever whether Dominique Strauss-Kahn did or did not rape or sexually molest the hotel maid. But he has already lost his job heading up the International Monetary Fund. His chances to run for senior government office are dashed. If he’s found guilty, then you might say all’s well and good, but he is currently innocent until proven guilty, and may never be found guilty. Charges may even be dropped. Where’s the “all’s well and good” in that?

This trend is significant for reputation management – of organisations as well as individuals.

And yet given the radical and real-time transparency of the social Web, I’ve been saying recently that ‘reality is perception’. I posit that this is a more relevant axiom today than the one that dominated the 20th Century, ‘perception is reality’. Am I not, therefore, contradicted here?

Social media measurement and the Influence Scorecard – HWZ Social Media Conference

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just arrived in Zurich at HWZ (Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration) for today’s Social Media Conference. I’m delighted to be keynoting at 1.30pm, and here’s my presentation.

I know… it’s a bit text heavy in parts. @gabbicahane has already pointed that out to me. I protested that for a slidestack to make sense to those people who are interested but who cannot make the conference, it needs to have more context than some beautiful pictures and seven words per slide.

How data is transforming digital marketing

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Digital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.

The pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.

Every one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding.

Big data

When it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable.

What does this mean in everyday terms?

My book, The Business of Influence, is out today

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s the day!

It’s ready for delivery in the UK today, and pre-order in other parts of the world. For those of you tweeting about availability in the US, currently listed as mid-June by some bookstores, Wiley tells me it should actually be with you mid-May. Thank you for your interest and patience.

What’s it about?

The Business of Influence is a rethink.

It’s about improving the capabilities of organisations to design and attend to the way in which all aspects of its operations influence stakeholders, about making sure stakeholders influence it, systematically, and about how well competitors are attempting the same. It focuses on influence as the common denominator of marketing and public relations and related activities such as customer service, sales, product development and HR, and therefore the basis for redesigning these and interconnecting them.

The book introduces the Influence Scorecard, named in homage to the dominant framework for business performance management, the Balanced Scorecard. The Influence Scorecard then is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard containing all the influence-related key performance indicators (KPIs) stripped of functional silo, and it may extend beyond the Balanced Scorecard should a greater operational granularity of metrics be demanded by the influence strategy.

The Influence Scorecard is a new framework for the 21st-century designed to help organisations focus on what matters rather than continue to carry the baggage and inefficiencies that come part and parcel of the typical 20th-century marketing and PR structure and approach. It’s a reframing in the context of 21st-century media and disintermediation, 21st-century technology, and 21st-century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy.

Radian6 and the Insights Platform – getting semantic

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in Boston this week for the Radian6 Social 2011 Conference. (Disclosure: Radian6 is paying my expenses to be here.) So far I’ve enjoyed talking with Radian6 CMO David Alston, OpenAmplify CEO Mark Redgrave, Edelman’s David Armano, Dell’s Head of Interactive Marketing Adam Brown, Klout Head of Platform Matthew Thomson, Marshall Sponder and Nathan Gilliatt.

Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun has kicked off the event this morning by launching the new Insights Platform , and I appreciate why Marcel is so enthusiastic about it.

Here’s how Radian6 describes it:

Insights are answers. Insights give meaning to unstructured volumes of content based your needs and integrated into our current dashboard offering. Current partners include Klout , OpenAmplify and OpenCalais . The insights that each of these partners offer (like age range, location, influencer score, textual analysis) are added as drill down options on the Dashboard widgets, so you are able to take your Radian6 topic profile mentions and overlay the insight partner data all in one place. No exporting River of News and doing comparative analysis in Excel to these providers data from your separate account, now it’s all been brought together for you.

How does it work? Well Radian6 has leaned heavily on the three partners, with both OpenAmplify and OpenCalais having deep expertise in semantic technologies. This is the tech that helps interpret, understand and process the meaning of content. Serious stuff.

CIPR social media measurement guidance

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The AVE (advertising value equivalence) approach to PR measurement and evaluation was simple. And utterly wrong.

It’s a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier and only addressing a fraction of the PR domain – a greater waste of time and effort you couldn’t hope to find.

Measurement and evaluation is essential, but requires real strategic understanding, diligence and perseverance. For me, it represents yet another distinction between the 21st Century PR professional and the 20th Century practitioner.

What's the ROI of social media?

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I was delighted to have the opportunity to present my take on the ROI of social media to approximately 80 people yesterday evening at the Digital Publishing Forum . It seems this was a hot topic of interest; as well it should be.

I sought to put the topic into perspective with the following challenge. What’s the ROI?…

Of the latest rebrand?
Of the office refurb?
Of the internal communications activity?
Of the training and development programme?
Of the upgrade to Windows 7?
Of the new standard issue smartphones?
Of the stakeholder engagement via social media?

If you’d like to see where we went from there, here’s the presentation:

Influence in the age of the social web – keynote to EUPRERA

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a beautiful sunny Spring day here at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium in Lisbon. It’s my first time at this gathering of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association – the forum for innovative PR research and education – and I’m delighted to have been invited to deliver the keynote.

Thanks to Philip Young and David Phillips for the invitation. Here’s the slidestack. I was a bit surprised to get a slide count of 77, but 16 of the slides present the infographic ‘Content – An illustrated history ’, which is easy to breeze through :-)

Meanwhile, a new approach to marketing and PR consultancy

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve teamed up with some very useful chaps to form Meanwhile . We’re defining venture marketing. Before I explain that further, I’ll elaborate on the main trends that make me think Meanwhile is precisely the right approach at the right time.

In short:

Previously distinct disciplines are converging
There is a renewed focus on measurement and evaluation of marketing and PR related programmes with boards demanding an unprecedented level of accountability
A new framework must emerge placing influence at the heart of business strategy.

Here’s how I present the situation in my upcoming book, The Business of Influence (Wiley, April 2011):

Book reviews, or what to give a marketing and PR professional for Christmas

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In a fast changing marketplace with fast changing technologies and consumer behaviours we have no option but to work hard keeping ourselves up to speed, week in week out. Time and money constraints rule out keeping abreast simply via course and event attendance, and the only real option is books.

Reading. Lots. Lots of books. Here’s a couple to make the Christmas List of any marketing and PR professional.

Real-Time Marketing & PR, by David Meerman Scott

Subtitle: How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.

I got my copy of Real-Time Marketing & PR end-October and I just read it yesterday. Mmmm, not exactly a real-time book review then. My only excuse is that I’ve had to focus on completing my own book (the manuscript is now submitted and it’s due out in April with Wiley, the same publisher of David’s latest books).

Let’s cut to the chase. Should every marketing and PR professional read this book? Yes; even those who consider themselves or are considered to be at the leading edge of this sort of thing. And I make that assertion simply on the basis that David peppers the book with many case studies and examples that will prove useful when attempting to convince the less savvy amongst your colleagues and clients of your point of view.

Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been out of circulation but had a crazy week before I left, including chairing the launch of 6UK for the promotion of the new Internet Protocol and running the UK’s first Internet of Things conference, Internetome . Thanks to the Intellect events team for super event management, and to the sponsors Intel, Qualcomm, Consumer Electronics Association, Meanwhile and 6UK.

Here’s my presentation “Marketing and Communications in the Internetome”:

Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

The next big big thing: it's happening now

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Marketing and PR as we know it today have been transformed by two massive technological revolutions. The first was the Web, when the Internet became user-friendly, and its subsequent social morphings. The second was the mobile phone and its current zenith, the smartphone. These are the two giants to which most everything else that’s changed relates.

The vast majority of marketing and PR strengths and weaknesses, and associated opportunities and threats, stem from the Web and from the smartphone. And yet another giant has emerged to which the vast majority of marketing and PR professionals are mostly blind in my experience: the Internet of Things.

Everything is being connected to the Internet. Cars, dishwashers, air conditioning, power supplies, clothes, animals, bottles of whisky, public transport, medicines, joint replacements, your front door, your training shoes and your bicycle. It is happening right now.

If you’re an innovator on the lifecycle / adoption curvy thing, then you were thinking about the Web in 1995, about mobile in 1998, and smartphones in 2005. You started scoping the Internet of Things in 2008.

Now it’s the end of 2010, it’s the time for the early majority to embrace the Internet of Things, and that’s you if you want more of that opportunity to come your way than the competition’s. Join me at Internetome, the Internet of Things Conference , in London, November 10th. Sponsors include Intel, Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association, and my own company.

And as the Internet of Things impacts all aspects of business not just marketing and PR, I’d urge you to get on the front foot and let the rest of your organisation / your clients know. Today.

Hope to see you on the 10th :-)

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Real-Time Marketing & PR

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

David Meerman Scott’s new book is out, Real-Time Marketing & PR – How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.

I’ve been gearing a client up for real-time marketing and PR recently. I’m in the midst of helping them prepare for the launch of a gorgeous new app for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android in November. (Ping me if you’re interested in social news readers and I’ll make sure you get your hands on it as soon as.) And part of that preparation has focused on the active listening capabilities and the workflow management needed to keep on top of the conversation and in the conversation. Thanks to the team at Nielsen Buzzmetrics , we have prepared all the search terms and we’ve made use of existing infrastructure to make sure the team understands who needs to respond and by when, as efficiently as possible without headache!

The fallacy of the influentials

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Life’s complicated, so we better get used to it. That’s my remote contribution to the Monitoring Social Media conference, Boston 2010 . In other words, your marketing and PR campaign does not pivot around finding and persuading 10, 20 or 50 so-called influentials.

We should de-emphasise the application of social Web analytics (aka social media analytics, listening platforms, social monitoring) to finding the influentials. Rather, we should employ these amazing tools and services to actively listen, to learn from the conversation and to facilitate the workflow aspects of joining in the conversation.

Life is complicated. Influence is complex. And it appears that we’re influenced more by our respective 150 nearest and dearest family and friends more often than the other 6 billion combined! I discuss the evidence for this assertion in my video here:

Contribute to the Influence Professional book

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing a book, provisionally titled Influence Professional. And the reading, the planning, the structuring and first few chunks of copy have been enjoyable in a hard work kinda way.

It’s 27 months since I was engrossed in writing the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 , and I’d forgotten how intense writing more than 140 characters or a blog post at a go can be. It’s cathartic to structure your thoughts tightly. And whereas one can say things off the cuff in conversation, when you’re committing to the page you find yourself having to source liberal references to support your assertions, which is thoroughly rewarding as you can’t help but learn more as you do it.

The 1st CIPR TV show

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

CIPR TV is underway!

I co-presented the first show this afternoon at 5pm with Stephen Waddington (@wadds ) and, despite the novice presenters, two aspects worked really well. First up, Paul Mylrea was a fantastic guest. The BBC’s Head of Press and Media Communications, and the CIPR’s 2011 President, Paul was never stuck for an interesting and articulate response to a wide range of questions spanning public sector PR, reputation washing, graduate recruitment and internships, diversity, the CIPR’s response to the ASA’s misguided stance towards social media , and his plans for the CIPR next year.

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things at the CIPR Social Summer session

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

@dewilded summed up one of the key conclusions we reached at the CIPR this evening in his tweet:

Companies thought they were laid bare by Web 2.0, they’ll feel positively naked w/out reputation mgt set for RDF & the semantic web #CIPRSM [link ]

My role was to act as tour guide and polemicist; to introduce the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things in just 90 minutes; and to leave the session attendees with considerable food for thought.

Hosting CIPR TV... live at five!

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ZeMQM-TQo&feature=player _embedded

The last time I was on TV it was the BBC’s Working Lunch, March 2002. I was running Europe’s first email money service at the time (before PayPal was available in these parts) and our servers were struggling quite a lot under the weight of our success on eBay UK. Facing up to a firm line of questioning, I was able to reassure Working Lunch viewers that any money they had stored with us was safe and sound.

Fast forward eight years and the definition of TV has changed somewhat. Indeed YouTube wasn’t even launched until 2005, before going on to be the fastest growing website ever. By 2007, the capacity consumed by YouTube exceeded that of the entire Internet in 2000. In May this year, over 24 hours worth of video was uploaded to YouTube for every single minute of the month!

And now we have .

CIPR Digital Impact Conference

Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR hosted a smashing event on Monday focusing on the impact of digital and attracting delegates from all sectors as well as a mix of in-house and agency.

I was given a half hour slot to throw my perspectives into the mix, and I decided I’d focus in on the following assertion:

It’s my opinion that the things people think have change haven’t, but some things have changed that aren’t yet widely understood.

Influence - The bullshit, best practice and promise

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here is the presentation I just delivered to Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp .

It seems to have gone down well from the Tweetstream (some Tweets cut and paste below). Thanks so much to the panellists, particularly as you had approximately zero seconds to prepare!

UPDATE 2nd April 2010: I’m delighted that my presentation on slideshare.net has, according to emails I received from slideshare, been their most discussed document on Twitter and Facebook, globally! That means the presentation was promoted to their homepage too. How cool is that?

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

PR and Web 3.0... a call to action

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Four things struck me in 2009. They are part of a bigger picture that means that public relations practice is about to undergo another change that will be as great this coming decade as it experienced during the last decade…

1. Web 2.0 participation

I dislike the 90:9:1 ratio of passives:occasionals:enthusiasts with respect to the “write” part of readwriteweb. In other words, 90% of people online don’t contribute anything, they remain passive consumers. 9% contibute content and interact now and then, and 1% are passionate bloggers, video makers, photo takers, wiki updaters etc.

The first Influence Scorecard meeting

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to all you lovely social Web analytics people who’ve emailed me about your excitement and concerns regarding the Influence Scorecard. I’m also delighted that Katie Delahaye Paine and Charlene Li have expressed their desire to be part of this (although to be fair I haven’t checked back with Charlene since February… are you around next week Charlene?)

I do appreciate your enthusiasm, but of course I wanted to post here about your concerns too. Once we have these concerns out of the way, it would be great to get these conversations into the public domain so I don’t have to write long blog posts keeping everyone up to date!

Given that I’ve been asked, let me start by saying why I love this space. Quite simply, it combines several passions of mine: organisational efficiency and effectiveness; the Internet and information technology; social media, democracy, consumer empowerment and community invigoration; mathematics and data visualisation.

But that’s me. What about the analytics industry? Why should competitors get in a room and tease this out collaboratively? That’s the concern some of you have raised, and there are two responses to this question.

The increasingly crowded market of Social Web Analytics

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In Brian Solis’ latest post, Unveiling the New Influencers , he reviews the reasons for listening to the marketplace for clues about how your organisation is doing, how it is perceived, and how the same stakeholders might regard your competition.

If you like his post, then you may like my free ebook on the topic, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 . Of course I recognise we’ve reached the first anniversary of the ebook this week (and over 35,000 downloads to date!), and it was time for me to post an update on the list of vendors I’m tracking. And wow is this market exploding.

(Brian lists some of these services in the section of his post titled “Listening + Conversation Management Systems”.)

If you are looking to procure such a service, then my ebook will tell you what you might want to look out for, and the list of potential partners below is pretty comprehensive. If you would like my help sourcing the right tool at the right price, then do just get in touch . Being based in London, I cover Western Europe, so for those of you in the US the man you need is Nathan Gilliatt .

An outline of the Influence Scorecard

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a busy year for me with my departure from Racepoint Group following my so-called “transition period” and my setting up a new consultancy. So apologies for the delay in getting back on the topic of the Influence Scorecard.

It hasn’t been far from my mind, particularly following the oodles of positive feedback in January and February, and believe you me, I’m intent on taking up your expressions of interest to meet before the year is out to take this forward. I want to collaborate with you. I want to find the most forward thinking social Web analytics vendors and forward thinking CMOs to put this into action, and commence the empirical fine tuning of the approach.

Most encouragingly, I have had fourteen companies in the social Web analytics space express their intent to get involved.

So I’m leaping back into it with a SlideShare presentation. It’s concise. It’s an outline, and focuses on the what rather than the how.

Your website and how it would change if it had an "About You" section rather than "About Us"

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

“Nobody cares about your products and services (except you) .” I believe this deliberately polemic assertion from David Meerman Scott is spot on. OK, you could possibly exempt shareholders and fellow employees too, but the implication stands. Moreover, saying “Nobody cares about your products and services (except you and the shareholders and fellow employees)” isn’t quite so catchy!

Think about it. When you bought that Philips TV, did you really care about Philips and its product range? No, you cared about the aesthetics of your living room, the sound and picture quality you’d experience, the screen size that would work with your space and furniture, and the hit to your bank balance.

When you were tendering your PR contract, you didn’t care about agency X or consultancy Y per se, you were focused on your personal and organisational objectives. How could your organisation communicate and come across better than it did? How could you exert influence in your noisy marketplace? How could you get that promotion or pay rise, or both? In fact, I bet the agency you hired talked more about you in the pitch than they did about themselves.

So, on that basis, why does your website have an “About us” section, or equivalent, but not an “About you”? Not only is the latter missing entirely from most websites, it should actually take priority over the former if you think the last three paragraphs rang true.

There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy - supporting perspective in Ad Age post

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A few days after I posted the succinctly titled “There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile ”, B.L. Ochman posted “Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet ” on the Ad Age DigitalNext blog.

Right up there at number 1:

You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It’s a tactic, a tool, not a strategy.

Now my post elicited some responses via Twitter (@sheldrake ) questioning my definition of the word “strategy”. So for clarity… your social Web strategy is the long-term “how” that follows the “what” of your social Web objectives.

I also agree with number 2 on the Ad Age post… if “every tweet has to be approved by legal” then your organisation is not ready for the social Web let alone little old Twitter. (I’d also argue that your business most likely isn’t ready to do business in 2009!)

There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their Twitter Strategy, or their Facebook Strategy. Contrast this with offline terminology… we never talk about a Press Release Strategy or a Features Tracking Strategy.

Twitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives.

The strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media.

The strategy sets out the framework for our current and future adoption of social Web channels, platforms, services and gizmos. It helps us work out which of these to adopt and how they might work together. It describes the over-arching ethos and policies for social media use, organisation-wide, and clearly articulates how success is to be gauged, month in and month out.

There is no such thing as Twitter Strategy, and if you think there is then you are Twittering for Twitter’s sake and not for business success.

Friday fun with "The Garden of Tweetdom"

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This slideshow made me laugh.

View more presentations from The Kaiser .

I’ve been a Twitter user now for two years, and I’m intrigued by its success.

You can attribute its success to its incredible simplicity, leaving the wider community to develop applications and ‘clients’ that anyone can chose to adopt or ignore.

You could attribute it to the character limit, meaning that no-one has to worry that they have to put much work into Tweeting (something that holds blogging back to this day), yet also short enough that clever-clogs can innovate and play games with the limitation.

You could attribute it to the ingenious (and incredibly obvious… with the advantage of hindsight) tweak to instant messaging. Take something that is already incredibly popular, but make it more public, more ‘many-to-many’.

Dear PR Week, it's not about Twitter per se

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In an unstunningly simple article in PR Week today ("Twitter has suddenly exploded ") we learn amongst other things that Edelman has 17 twittering staff and Racepoint 8, whilst Drew Benvie has twittered 3779 times.

I’d write here things like “AWESOME” and “WOW, HOW ENLIGHTENING”, but I understand sarcasm is the lowest form of wit so I’ll refrain.

What’s with all the numbers? Why on Earth are they the story? But before I explain myself, I will just dwell on the numbers for a minute.

…I don’t know a Racepoint consultant who isn’t on Twitter, and there’s a lot more of us than eight people! How can Porter Novelli global digital director Mat Morrison feel so confident in his data? He should have at least added the caveat that one can only determine when a Twitter user is a consultant from a specific PR consultancy should the individual chose to promote the fact in their personal profile.

Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

To recap, this is where marketing communications has got to…

Interruption marketing (stop right there for 30 seconds while I hit you with this message even if this message is totally irrelevant to you) is dead.

Your brand and reputation is defined by everyone’s experiences with your organisation and their compulsion to share those experiences with others.

You simply have no choice, you have to converse. Dialogue is where it’s at. If you’re into monologue, then it really is the same thing as staying at home and still thinking you’ll get the girl.

So I thought I’d focus here on how to present your conversation starter rather than the content per se.

Multimedia engagement is one of the most compelling and interesting ways to start a conversation about something interesting. Just think what’s grabbed your attention online recently. The 30-second TV ad may be as relevant today as monetary policy, but the 300-second roll on the Web is perfect for the niche audience out there with whom you really want to engage and who really wants to know more about what you’ve got.

So what kind of multimedia are we talking? How can we spark the conversation by communicating the really interesting thing we have to say in an interesting way? There’s no formula (that I know of!), but here’s a couple of my favourites to stimulate your “PR 2.0” synapses, one film and one animation. I’ll follow up this post some time soon with my favourite interactive-game-with-a-point-to-make and call-to-action-social-microsite.

Influence Scorecard update

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks

Whilst the volume of responses to the Influence Scorecard has been amazing and very encouraging, for a topic so closely related to the Social Web, I’ve been astonished at the number of responses by email rather than, well, more socially!

Nevertheless, I’m far from ungrateful of course. Indeed, “Thank you”. And I’d like to take time here to shout out specifically to the following social web analytics specialists for their support, and then I’ve added some reciprocal blog links…

Nielsen Online, TNS Cymfony, J.D. Power Umbria, Clarabridge, Influencer50, Techrigy, Brandwatch, dna13, VMSInfo, Radian6, Integrasco, BuzzLogic, MotiveQuest, RepuMetrix, Andiamo, CIC, Attentio, Scout Labs.

Questions

Where you’ve come back with questions, they have been about two aspects in general… definitions and events.

Does Facebook Matter? Find out in the second edition of Marketing To The Social Web

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Larry Weber releases the 2nd edition of Marketing to the Social Web today. After the first edition sold out, the publisher (Wiley) asked my chairman to update the book for a second run.

With a foreword by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, the second edition includes new chapters on Facebook (entitled “Does Facebook Matter?”… he believes it does and moreover will surpass Google), measurement and marketing to mobile social media.

Enhancing Organisational Performance Management with the Influence Scorecard

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I posted about hosting a meeting on the Influence Scorecard . The post was testing the water to determine the level of interest such an event might generate, and I was answered by dozens of emails, direct twitters, comments and even some direct editing of the post itself, as I’d hoped! (MarCom Professional allows an author to permit others to edit a post, wiki-style.)

I even received tentative enquiries about sponsorship, so it looks like we are on to something here…

Moreover, the interest was split almost 50:50 between Europe and North America, and it was spread fairly evenly amongst each of the required participant groups.

What is clear from all the queries and interest is that we now need to put some meat on the bones. Here are a few top line thoughts on ‘influence’, ‘scorecard’ and what we hope to achieve. Your thoughts are welcome.

Influence

Organisations want to influence the opinion and behaviour of their stakeholders. They do this via the various marketing and communications disciplines and approaches - PR, advertising, branding, community building, conversational marketing, direct marketing, events, product placement, public affairs, sponsorship etc..

Of course, stakeholders also influence each other and some will want to influence an organisation - how ready an organisation is for this dialogue is another matter.

Scorecard

The ‘scorecard’ is inspired by the Balanced Scorecard, one of the most widely adopted organisational performance management methodologies (generally known as “business performance management ” or just plain BPM). According to the Balanced Scorecard Institute :

Influence Scorecard - defining influence measurement for organisational performance management

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When I first decided to write The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 , I had no idea it would attract over 10,000 downloads in 100 days. And why does it continue to be downloaded 1,000 times a month? In hindsight, the reasons are plain:

Listening to and learning from all our stakeholders is a widely and keenly felt desire
Acquiring a grasp of the reputation our company and brands have notched up must constitute a key organisational performance metric for anyone
Understanding how our interaction and dialogue with our stakeholders contributes to the achievement of our marketing and communications objectives helps us quantify how well we are meeting those objectives.

What's the difference between the social web and social media?

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been asked at least a dozen times why The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 refers to the “Social Web” and not “Social Media”. In fact, the terms appear to have attracted similar usage according to a quick Google search count today:

“social web analytics” - Google estimates 18,600 results
“social media analytics” - Google estimates 20,100 results

Interestingly, however, the term “social media” attracts more than twice the search count estimate as “social web”:

“social web” - Google estimates 8,250,000 results
“social media” - Google estimates 19,700,000 results

Social media is a subset of the social web.

Influence... it's a numbers game

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Andrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday “Where are the PR Numerati? ” (and here on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he’s right and I’m numerate and I’m in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book “The Numerati ” by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker.

Public relations had been boiled down to a very simple process by the end of the 1990s. Journalists write the papers and magazines the public reads. The PRs know the journalists. The clients retain the PR professionals.

That simple world is no more. I don’t mean that traditional media relations no longer exists, only that it is now just a sub-set of a far more complex map of exerting influence. The best PR professionals will:

Where the social Web goes from here

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s good to talk. The more people can reach out and find the right people and organisations to relate to, to discuss the issues important to them, to learn, to hang out and have fun, to contribute content and opinion and ideas, then the more satisfying they will find being part of society. I’m no sociologist, but it sounds like a good heuristic to me.

I stand by the assertion in my ebook on Social Web Analytics : “Ultimately, the Social Web has revolutionised communications massively and irrevocably, to the benefit of the consumer, the adaptive and agile organisation, and those who cherish an open society.”

Organisations’ engagement with the Social Web is still sufficiently nascent that it offers earlier adopters competitive advantage. And in the longer term however, it will be a condition of staying in the race.

Three amazing things

I’m posting today because three pretty amazing things have happened recently to catalyse this future; to extend the highly networked and Twitter -fuelled connectivity enjoyed by the minority today to the general population. I discuss these below, but first let me put this into context for those of you who not only have a FriendFeed , you’ve already fed it your BackType profile.

You’re not normal.

When Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be the marketers best friend

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Let me show you an image and ask you some questions. Do complete the questionnaire and all will be revealed later at the end of this post!

________________________________

You might have established that I am not a qualified automotive designer, researcher or marketer. But what do you do when you do want to know answers to questions like these?

Enter Amazon ’s Mechanical Turk service.

Their FAQs describe the service as follows:

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient.

The Buzz of Social Web Analytics - vendors reach out for the 2009 eBook

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The social Web analytics (SWA) field is buzzing, and I’m being contacted by companies in the sector that I didn’t know about when I published The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 on the 1st July. They’re keen to make the 2009 update, and at this rate that will have to come earlier than later next year. The 2008 eBook has already been downloaded over five thousands of times, which I’m sure is more reflective of the heat in the market than the quality of my prose!

I define SWA as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence. Here’s a quick look at some of the vendors reaching out to me, then rounding off with a bit of gratuitous data visualisation of the blogosphere (you know how I get my kicks).

Techrigy

Techrigy describes itself as enabling “organizations to know what’s being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy’s SM2 solution enables organizations to monitor and analyze conversations, including sentiment, across blogs, social networks, wikis, online video and other user-generated content on the web. Ultimately, Techrigy helps organizations embrace social media, manage risk and identify market trends in real time.”

Can you see it? Making influence visible.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a revolution coming in public relations… visualisation.

[Courtesy Christopher Baker ]

Picture the scene

You hold an event to gather key stakeholders together, say a couple of dozen, and you want to maximise the positive networking such an event should catalyse. You’re also aware of a few potential personality clashes. But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?

It turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there’s 300 relationships in that room! Wow, and compared to the big ‘World Wide Web’, or the even bigger ‘World’ come to that, this is a relatively insignificant number of people.

Let’s go a step further. Say that there’s just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has just three positions, say “for”, “against” and “no position”, then each stakeholder can have one of 243 combinations of points of view.

To complete this picture, imagine now communicating the dynamic of this group in a report back to your boss say. How do you represent 300 relationships and 243 combinations of positions? Moreover, how do you portray the network evolving year-to-year, month-to-month, hour-by-hour?

Welcome to the world of data visualisation.

Wordle - extending the fascination of a tag cloud

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

For those obsessed with tags - and what marketer wouldn’t be based on the fact that you want your brand to be a tag as often as possible, and to understand how your content and products are being tagged - check out Wordle . Bringing style to the tag cloud.

Here’s one I ran for MarCom Professional just now (click on it or here to see the original), and then a description of Wordle in their own words.

The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Social Web Analytics (SWA) is the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence.

The advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry.

It’s just over ten weeks since I posted about my intention to write an ebook on social Web analytics, and now it’s done. The ebook is hosted at www.socialwebanalytics.com , or you can simply click here to download it .

End-to-end marketing: the possibilities of a new Internet protocol

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’re just about to go through a complete renumbering of the Internet, and I think some marketing issues and opportunities will emerge along the way.

The way the Internet works today means that just less than 4.3 billion different Internet devices can be addressed uniquely… an address being just that, the unique identifier stating where packets of information are sent from and where they should go. So just as my work address is Building 5, 50 Brook Green, London, W6 7BJ, UK - a unique address at which I’m sure to receive anything you send me - my current IP address at this Boston hotel is 209.190.164.35.

I know that because I just visited www.whatismyip.com and they looked at the server I was connected to, grabbed the address and stuck it on their homepage for me. Try it.

Twingly - new blog search engine launches

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Twingly launches today, “the next generation blog search engine”. I posted about joining the private beta a couple of months ago, and now everyone is welcome. Check it out. I quite like it. www.twingly.com .

Searching harder - search panel at Being Digital

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Just watched Giles Palmer’s presentation on search trends here at Being Digital . His company, Magpie , is one of those I’m including in my upcoming eBook on Social Web Analytics (pushed back a week or so due to better than expected social life… yes, I have one).

[Simon Grice listens in to Giles Palmers presentation].

Currently Microsoft’s Jeff Kelisky (ex-Multimap CEO) is talking about Microsoft search being an online representation of the real world… 3D search if you like. He’s showing a video of 3D cityscapes, but I can’t see much search going on. Hang on, no, that’s just a virtual Earth 3D demo. Mmmm, looks like Jeff doesn’t know if he’s in search or mapping. Or perhaps both, but as he’s pointed out, we’ve had the panel on location today.

Jeff has also been keen to big up MIcrosoft’s cashback search I posted about recently .

The B2B Social Web - B2B video programming

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My last post described the first half of my interview with Ecommerce Times. The second half of our interview focused on B2B video programming, or what the publication described as TV Media Relations . B2B multimedia is one of my favourite topics, so I plunged straight in…

Forget “Pop Idol” and “The Apprentice”, B2B programming is the new hot programming. We’re within sight of bespoke TV shows dedicated to your industry, your profession. Coming to a screen near you, a whole raft of new productions with names like Logistics Insights Live, The Coronary Care Beat, Patent Law Update, IT Compliance Bulletin.

But where is this “screen near you”? What is TV?

The B2B Social Web - my interview with the Ecommerce Times

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The B2B Social Web has arrived and it’s not going to go away.

I was interviewed recently about the Social Web for a series of articles for Ecommerce Times, and here’s the first half of our conversation…

1) What is THE most significant issue regarding the appearance of Web phenomena like social professional networks?

If being an expert or leader in your market is defined as others’ regard for your insight, skills or services, then you must participate in the networks where this expertise is being shared, and where the people you want to influence are going to help shape their viewpoint. For many professions, these networks remain predominantly offline, but this balance will tip in favour of online for most if not all professions eventually.

MarCom Professional is a great example in my industry, and other social professional networks include sermo.com for physicians and inmobile for the wireless industry.

2) What major trends should my readers know about?

The all-singing, all-dancing social network (Friendster, Myspace, Bebo, Facebook) will increasingly represent the minority of our online social networking. We will gravitate towards specialised networks dedicated to our specific sports interest, hobby, profession, health condition etc.

Win a free ticket to Being Digital conference courtesy of Taptu

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Hi,

Readers of my blog may know I’m speaking on one of the panels at the Being Digital conference, London, 10th June 2008. Well you might then like to know that you can win a free ticket to this event via Taptu… see their blog post here .

Summize - Twitter sentiment analytics

Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Those of you who follow my blog will know I’m currently into Social Web Analytics. Here’s my last post on the topic . So some interesting news from Summize’s labs, a new semantic analysis tool to give you a snapshot of the feeling in the Twittersphere.

Simply go here and enter the brand or object name in which you’re interested. Here’s one I did earlier…

Online, offline, up a tree, down a cellar - effective networking is all in the mix

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Being so fascinated by and engrossed in social networking, and digital media relations more widely, I’m asked on a regular basis “What’s the point of spending so much time online?”.

The very basis of the question betrays the fact that the questioner still, like the majority of people to be fair, feels it necessary to divide their life up into “offline” and “online” portions. Yet they don’t distinguish “time eating / not eating”, “time talking / listening”, “time with new people / with old acquaintances”, “time on the phone / not on the phone”.

Like eating, listening and telephones, digital media simply exists. It is part of life. Sure it may have its unique characteristics, but then what doesn’t? I am living, working, having fun, exploring, innovating, learning… some of which just happens to be online and some offline.

Listen. The Science of Social.

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I have been invited to no less than a dozen seminars, training courses and conferences about social media in the last month or so. In case you didn’t know, social media marketing is quite hot at the moment! Having presented on blogging for business since 2002, before this stuff got its own shows, and even mooted the death of market research in 2006 , it’s fascinating to see how quickly people cut and paste together their own position on this stuff.

One glaring betrayal of the ‘social media practices’ that have only recently assembled their facade is their ignorance of the power of listening. They will tell you just how they will be your voice on the social Web, but too rarely do they volunteer to proxy your ears.

Listening to one person isn’t easy; active listening is a discipline. Imagine then trying to find, tap into and track one hundred conversations, a thousand, ten thousand; and interpretting this information… turning it into knowledge that informs your marketing strategy and tactics.

This forms a large part of what we call social Web analytics. We define this as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking (listening) and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence.

Twingly in private beta - "a next-generation blog search engine"

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve signed up and will let you know what I find when I’m allowed in! From their press release today…

Today we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com?

Spam free, social search

Twingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.

Social search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole.

Powerful search language and tech plan Digg

Twingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways.

But we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next!

UPDATE

Well I’ve got my invite and I’ve logged in to take a look.

UK Next Generation Access - what might we have to play with?

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve come a long way since 56k dial-up, and marketers have long taken advantage of the audio-visual capabilities of broadband for advertising (digital media marketing more generically) and not-paid-for influence (digital media relations). You only have to witness the furore created by the online videos seeking to influence the US primaries .

But what is broadband, and where are we going from here?

To quote Connect’s excellent report “Connecting Britain’s Future - the slow arrival of fast broadband ”:

So what do we mean then by fast broadband? There is no standard set of definitions, but commonly:

narrowband would mean up to 512kbit/s
broadband would mean up to 25mbit/s
fast broadband would mean anything over 25mbit/s

The common industry term for such fast broadband is NGA - Next Generation Access.

Over sixty people from the communications industry (the other communications industry… the one with the switches, wires and fibres) came together yesterday evening at the Convergence Conversation event I chair, and invested a couple of hours teasing out the complexities of delivering NGA in the UK.

Write-off reading and writing. The three R's are dead; long live the three M's

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the hammerings of educationalists, the so-called three R’s are far from sacrosanct: reading, writing and arithmetic. I’m talking specifically about the first two of these.

(OK, I’m not talking about them, I am actually writing and that irony isn’t lost on me. But then I am future gazing, and I could after all have podcast this post.)

Reading and writing have been bedrocks of civilisation, some would say the foundation, and it is only relatively recently that they have had competition as a media for non-synchronous communication. The 20th Century triumphs of broadcast radio, broadcast TV and semiotics compensated slightly for an individual’s illiteracy, but they were far from a perfect substitute and entirely useless when that individual wished to communicate back.

The 21st Century hasn’t taken long however to present a cornucopia of communication possibilities. Whilst applications of the Internet were dominated just a few years ago by text, and lots and lots of it, new applications pivot massively around the audio-visual. “Radio” and “TV” over IP / Narrowcasting / Podcasting / Moblogging / Vlogging / On Demand / Voice over IP / Video conferencing…

Morph

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m obsessed with device usability, and high on that list is the graphical user interface. Marketers focused on phones and mobile Internet devices emphasise their understanding of the impacts of the user interface and everything stacked up behind it, but what about the possibilities of mobile sensory marketing?

Future mobile devices will be able to sense their surroundings: sight, sound and smell. We already have forward thinking companies like Mobile Acuity interpretting still images taken by mobile phones for consumer engagement objectives, but what would you do with smell!?

Links from Feb Away Day

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As promised, here’s the links relevant to all the stuff we discussed on Friday at the Away Day:

Readius at Mobile World Congress

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Following my earlier post from the Mobile World Congress , another gadget update…

Philips spun off Polymer Vision in 2006, and February last year the company announced that their first product would be the Readius. At this year’s show, the company demonstrated the final commercial product for the first time. Slated for a “mid-08” launch, it will be very interesting to observe how retail categorises the device, and its rate of uptake.

Is it a phone? No. Is it an eBook; well yes I guess, but not in the same vein as Amazon’s Kindle or the Reader Digital Book from Sony .

The Readius measures just 75mm x 21mm x 15mm closed, sufficiently compact to slip in a breast pocket or a handbag’s phone pocket with ease. Well, unless you store your phone there of course. But the screen (aka epaper) has to be seen to be believed. It is so un-screen like that I assumed at first I was looking at a mock-up! It’s pretty damn fascinating, and considerably more akin to the pleasure and ease of reading paper than looking at a LCD.

Mobile World Congress: Tech news and the implications for marketers

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There were no female passengers on the plane. I kid you not. It could only mean I was headed for a gadget fest.

The 2008 Mobile World Congress is buzzing. No signs of a recession here. It’s particularly buzzing about, yet without mentioning, a company that’s not even here. Apple.

Whilst official company statements make no comparison between Sony Ericsson’s 10 new phones and the iPhone, Samsung’s 8 new phones and the iPhone, or Nokia’s 4 new phones and the iPhone, the overarching message is clear. The market will not coalesce on one style of phone. Variety is the spice of life. So up yours Apple.

The mobile phone, or “device” more generically, ranks amongst people’s most personal possessions. It’s up there with your wallet and keys on leaving your front door, and the variations of mobile device will continue to be as diverse as the variations in everything else we consider personal. Clothes. Cars. Furniture.

Mobile devices will never share the same hardware platform, or the same software platform, but they do universally represent the greatest and most enticing conduit to the end-customer the marketer has ever known. For both B2B and B2C, for advertising, interactive dialogue and customer engagement.

Does your campaign measure up to search?

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The evaluation of PR campaign effectiveness is controversial. Forget for a moment the inadequate practitioners that insist all PR must have a benefit so better just get on with it than devote energy to measuring it, and you’re left with an array of evaluation processes as diverse as the number of agencies.

Return on investment

The most over-used term is ROI. And that applies to all marketing disciplines not just PR. For example, I posted last week about the winners of OnMedia’s Best of Broadband Advertising awards , yet when you read the rationale justifying OnMedia’s selections only three out of ten make an attempt to link the campaign to a fillip to the client’s bottom line. “Creative” and “ROI” are not synonymous.

FT writes about "Gated Communities in Cyberspace"

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The word Cyberspace always makes me chuckle for some reason. Not sure why. Anyway, I noticed an article recently in the FT - “Business urged to woo social network figures ” - about a report from Experian and Hitwise saying, well, that business should make sure they look after influential people online. Cool. My headline would be “Influential people are influential people, online or off”.

But it was the box-out in the article that I wanted to highlight here, particularly as it relates to this MarCom Professional network. Not sure about the examples though. I quote….

Interesting stuff for a Friday

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Three great sites to play with from a professional perspective, and an intriguing game from a non-professional perspective :-)

Daylife

“Daylife is a news site and distribution platform that organizes the world’s news into a rich landscape of related stories and images of every size and perspective.

Designed to enable new ways to present and explore the world of news, Daylife gathers news from thousands of sources worldwide for you to:

Foggy communications

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As a director of a consultancy helping clients communicate more effectively, I’m used to analysing the difference between “winners” and “qualifiers”, between Seabiscuit and the also-rans. Maybe marketing communications has evolved so much in recent years, or maybe we just work with good people to start with, but I’d forgotten about the donkeys.

I was rudely reminded of this reality over the Christmas season courtesy of Royal Air Maroc ’s Atlas Blue subsidiary. Crappy, very crappy customer communication. Oh so very crap indeed.

Nevertheless, I’ve been able to wend the story of dealing with Air Maroc into my presentations to customers and prospects on good digital marketing relations, as a counter-example, even though I didn’t interact with Air Maroc digitally at all.

2007 - The Year of Social Networking

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

It’s December. Time for pseudo-snow to uphold the pretence of a white Christmas. Time for Christmas pop songs to replenish the coffers of faded pop idols. And, of course, time for reflections on the year.

The biggest trends in marketing communications in 2007 were without a doubt the rise and rise of social networks, and the associated dominance of video content – professional and user-generated. Not a theme ignored on MarCom Professional I can see.

This has been a subject close to our hearts since we ran the first blog training course for our clients in 2001 and introduced them to conversational PR not long after. That was the term we used then, but now we talk about the brand as the sum of the quality of its dialogue with its stakeholders, and our Chairman Larry Weber decided, rightly, that 2007 was the year the mass market wanted to read more about it.

Magpie Brandwatch

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just stumbled upon this service, Magpie Brandwatch . As an engineer by training, nothing quite appeals to me more than a good looking chart, but I’d like to ask a question of anyone who knows more about these things than me… How do they disambiguate brand names?

In other words, when looking for commentary about Apple, how do they differentiate between Apple and the type you eat? What if you were trying to track where people are talking about Creative. Great brandname; very very difficult to disambiguate. Virgin? Next? Palm? Shell? Gap?

myChannel

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

It started with the town crier. Then the daily newspaper. It broadened with radio and then television. Communication now comes at you from all angles – via papers, magazines, journals, radio, digital radio, satellite radio, terrestrial TV, TV text services, digital TV, satellite TV, cable TV, mobile portals, push alerts on mobile devices, newsgroups, websites, RSS newsfeeds, streaming media services and pod-casting.

The choice has become so complex for consumers that there is even a choice of magazines and websites dedicated to helping us make a choice. The selection and diversity will continue to grow but the act of “choosing” is about to change significantly. We are returning to just one channel – myChannel.